Porreca, Immacolata (2010) The zebrafish model to identify new genes involved in thyroid development. [Tesi di dottorato] (Unpublished)

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Item Type: Tesi di dottorato
Resource language: English
Title: The zebrafish model to identify new genes involved in thyroid development
Creators:
CreatorsEmail
Porreca, Immacolataimmacolata.porreca@szn.it
Date: 30 November 2010
Number of Pages: 71
Institution: Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
Department: Biologia e patologia cellullare e molecolare "L. Califano"
Scuola di dottorato: Medicina molecolare
Dottorato: Genetica e medicina molecolare
Ciclo di dottorato: 23
Coordinatore del Corso di dottorato:
nomeemail
Nitsch, Lucionitsch@unina.it
Tutor:
nomeemail
Di Lauro, Robertodilauro@szn.it
Date: 30 November 2010
Number of Pages: 71
Keywords: development; zebrafish; thyroid
Settori scientifico-disciplinari del MIUR: Area 06 - Scienze mediche > MED/03 - Genetica medica
Area 05 - Scienze biologiche > BIO/18 - Genetica
Additional information: L'attività di dottorato è stata svolta presso la Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn di Napoli
Date Deposited: 13 Dec 2010 22:34
Last Modified: 30 Apr 2014 19:45
URI: http://www.fedoa.unina.it/id/eprint/8187
DOI: 10.6092/UNINA/FEDOA/8187

Collection description

Thyroid organogenesis is a very complex developmental process that leads to the formation of an organ able to produce specific hormones through specification, migration, structural organization and functional differentiation of thyroid precursor cells. In mammals, alteration of these mechanisms might be responsible for congenital hypothyroidism (CH), the most frequent inherited endocrine disease. Thyroid development in fish is comparable to mammals at both ontogenetic and molecular levels: the thyroid develops from the endodermal tissue, at the midline of the pharyngeal floor, and its formation is subdivided into main successive steps shared with mammals. The genetic program involved in fish thyroid differentiation, including the activity of transcription factors such as Nkx2.1a, Pax8 and Hhex, is conserved with respect to expression patterns and functions. To gain further insights on the genetic machinery implicated in normal thyroid development, and therefore in CH disease, an oligonucleotide microarray analysis was performed in mouse with the aim to identify genes differentially expressed during gland organogenesis. This approach highlighted a list of genes enriched in embryonic mouse thyroid. In the present work, the zebrafish model was used to perform functional analysis on fish counterparts of the murine thyroid enriched genes. Looking at the expression territories of the zebrafish orthologs, a very low correlation in thyroid expression profile between mouse and zebrafish was found: indeed, very few mouse thyroid expressed genes have their zebrafish ortholog being expressed in thyroid primordium. This observation strongly suggests that some changes concerning thyroid development occurred from lower to higher vertebrates; during evolution, the thyroid of higher vertebrates probably recruited new genetic pathways/functions by means of mutations occurred in cis-regulatory elements. Despite the low correlation in expression profiles, a new conserved function relevant for thyroid development was identified with this comparative approach; an anti-apoptotic function, represented by Bcl2 in mouse and bcl2l in zebrafish, was conserved during thyroid evolution. Knock-down experiments conducted by means of morpholinos injection, have revealed that bcl2l is regulated by the thyroid transcription factors and plays a relevant role in normal thyroid development. Indeed, bcl2l thyroid expression was lost in embryos deprived of the thyroid transcription factors, leading to thyroid degeneration via apoptosis. It is feasible to hypothesize that a conserved antiapoptotic function during thyroid evolution could counteract a putative proapoptotic function, ready to intervene if something fails during normal gland morphogenesis.

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